Pretoria - An evil deed deserves the harshest punishment.
This was the message to 27-year-old Dennis Sithole, who has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the cold-blooded killing of his lover Sharon Ndlovu.
He not only stabbed her repeatedly, but climbed into bed with her and slept next to her while she was either dying or after she had died.
After it was confirmed by a witness called to the scene that there was no more life in her, Sithole again crept in the bed with her and shared her blanket.
Judge Papi Masopa, sitting in the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, told Sithole that killing a vulnerable person did not deserve mercy. “It makes you a criminal. When you now go back to prison to serve your life sentence, you must know that women are not a commodity; they should be respected.”
The judge added that anyone who engaged in gender-based violence should take note of this sentence and his message.
Both Sithole and Ndlovu were waiters; she worked at a restaurant in Menlyn and he at Brooklyn. They had a love relationship for years, from the time when the 25-year-old Ndlovu was still at school.
The court heard from her family members that Sithole was abusive towards her over the years, but she loved him dearly. While she had her own flat in town, she had often stayed over at his shack in Mamelodi.
Judge Masopa said Ndlovu believed love conquered all.
On the night of October 2, 2019, Sithole went to the home of Ndlovu, who was still at work. He knocked on the door, but her sister Caroline refused to open it.
Caroline testified that Sithole waited for her sister to return. When she got home, he wanted her to go home with him, but she refused.
Caroline told the court how he grabbed her by the arm and dragged her off. She said she then went to bed and did not think much of it as her sister often spent the night at Sithole’s home.
She woke up the next morning and saw a lot of missed calls and messages from her brother, asking if she had seen her sister.
Caroline told him that she went home with Sithole.
Ndlovu’s cousin, Nyelethi Mathebula, testified that Sithole phoned her in the early hours of the morning and told her to come to their home as they had been robbed.
She said that when she got there, Sithole told her robbers overpowered them when he went to fetch Ndlovu from where the taxi had dropped her.
He had said the robbers stabbed them and took their belongings.
Asked where Ndlovu was, Sithole took her into the shack and pointed to the bed. Mathebula said she saw blood everywhere in the shack – on the bed, on the curtains and on the floor.
She found Ndlovu under a blanket on the bed and she tried to shake her awake, but the body was lifeless.
She told Sithole to phone for an ambulance. But he said he did but it had never arrived.
“He then told me he was cold and he wanted to sleep. He got into bed next to Sharon and shared part of the blanket with her. I stormed out of the shack in total hysteria and called for an ambulance and the police.”
Mathebula said that while she was still in the shack, she noticed that her cousin’s handbag and cellphone were still there.
A police official testified that when he got to the shack, he found Sithole in the bed. He asked him what happened and Sithole said they had been robbed, but that they managed to get home. He had said that when the ambulance and police failed to arrive, he put his girlfriend in bed and went to sleep next to her, thinking that he would seek help the next day.
As Sithole also had some cuts – said to be superficial by a doctor who testified – the ambulance took him to hospital. The officer had looked around the house and seen that there was a lot of blood, but none outside.
He also noticed that the door handle was blood-smeared inside but clean outside. He also found a butcher's knife in the drawer, covered with blood.
The SAPS officer saw that Ndlovu’s nightdress, which was full of blood and on the floor, had a stab mark on the same side of which she had been stabbed.
He went to hospital to question Sithole, who had told him his girlfriend and he had had an argument, and that she stabbed him.
He was then arrested.
Testifying in court, Sithole told another version of the story. He said he was tired that night and they went to bed when they got home. He later woke up with a hand on his shoulder and saw three robbers.
He said the men attacked them and took some of their belongings.
Judge Masopa said it was a mystery what exactly had happened that night, but Sithole was definitely guilty.
Ndlovu’s father, Freddy Baloyi, said that when he got to the shack his daughter’s body had been removed. “But the smell of my daughter’s blood was horrific,” he said.
When Ndlovu was found, she was partly dressed in clean clothes. It appeared that Sithole had removed her bloodied nightdress and changed her clothing to suit his version that they had been attacked on the way home.
Sithole showed no emotion as the judge handed down the life sentence.
Pretoria News